.'

It is an indisputable fact, then, both from his mission and uniform
conduct and his express declaration, that Christ knew himself free from
sin and guilt. The only rational explanation of this fact is, that
Christ _was_ no sinner. And this is readily conceded by the greatest
divines--even those who are by no means regarded as orthodox. The
admission of this fact implies the further admission that Christ
differed from all other men, not in degree only, but in _kind_. For
although we must utterly repudiate the pantheistic notion of the
necessity of sin, and must maintain that human nature, in itself
considered, is capable of sinlessness, that it was sinless, in fact,
before the fall, and that it will ultimately become sinless again by the
redemption of Christ; yet it is equally certain that human nature, in
its _present_ condition, is not sinless, and never has been since the
fall, except in the single case of Christ, and that for this very reason
Christ's sinlessness can only be explained on the ground of such an
extraordinary indwelling of God in him as never took place in any other
human being, before or after. The entire Christian world, Greek, Latin,
and Protestant, agree in the scriptural doctrine of the universal
depravity of human nature since the apostasy of the first Adam. Even the
modern and unscriptural dogma of the Roman Catholic Church, of the
freedom of the Virgin Mary from hereditary as well as actual sin, can
hardly be quoted as an exception; for her sinlessness is explained in
the papal decision of 1854 by the assumption of a miraculous
interposition of divine favor, and the reflex influence of the merits of
her Son. There is not a single mortal who must not charge himself with
some defect or folly, and man's consciousness of sin and unworthiness
deepens just in proportion to his self-knowledge and progress in virtue
and goodness. There is not a single saint who has not experienced a new
birth from above, and an actual conversion from sin to holiness, and who
does not feel daily the need of repentance and divine forgiveness. The
very greatest and best of them, as St. Paul and St. Augustine, have
passed through a violent struggle and a radical revolution, and their
whole theological system and religious experience rested on the felt
antithesis of sin and grace.

But in Christ we have the one solitary and absolute exception to this
universal rule, an individual thinking like a man, feeling like a man,